WTH is World Backup Day?

[Review]

I have totally no idea what World Backup Day was all about, until recently, after having clicked on some links shared by friends on Facebook. To cut it short, it is simply a day put aside once a year, for you to do a backup of all the files and data that are important to you. This happens on 31 March every year because it seems that there are usually more cyber attacks on 01 April (April Fools Day) than any other days of the year. Hence it was deemed to be a good practice to do a backup prior to that. Oh by the way, it is really just an awareness day, and not a public holiday if you are still wondering.
  

So why do you backup? For myself, I treasure all the photo moments captured with my family and these are memories that I wish to keep FOREVER. In the past, I only stored all my photos in my laptop, with some in diskettes, and that was my big mistake. I never did a backup, and wrongly assumed that everything would be alright. It turned out that my laptop crashed, and despite the very best efforts by my colleagues in the IT department to try to salvage the situation, a great deal of digital photographs were ultimately deemed unretrievable ever. 

 

I love taking photos of my kiddos, do you? These are all my backup copies!

Everyone owns a smartphone nowadays, okay, almost everyone. Taking photos, saving contacts and telephone numbers are all made easy. So easy that sometimes we fail to do a backup of all the really important stuff stored in our phones. These could be important contacts or precious photographs taken at the right moments. I know this too well too, as I had my phone stolen last year. I wasn't too concerned then because it was really just an old phone due for upgrading. So I got a new one but when I tried to update the new phone from my iTunes, I realized that it was months since my last backup. Hence I lost a big chunk of photographs of my kiddos and some new contacts as well. It wasn't the money, but it was really painful, knowing that the photographs are lost forever.

There are so many reasons for one to perform regular backups on different platforms, just to save yourself from the heartaches. It hurts real bad I tell you! So what would be the recommended backups methods for you?

• Make a duplicate of the data on an external drive. Buy a good external harddisk;
• Store your data on the Internet by utilizing free spaces on OneDrive, Dropbox or even Google Drive;
• Or you subscribe to a trustworthy service provider to safekeep your data. 

There are pros and cons for all the above, but you should really do ALL of them anyway. Do note that external harddisks can do and do fail too, sometimes more often than expected. Just read the recent news regarding the lawsuit on Seagate. Besides, what would happen if your PC and external devices are all stored in the same location and something happens there, damaging everything in the process?

Maybe you think that the free online solutions would be sufficient. Well, I thought so too initially, as I also use Dropbox regularly, but the reality is, it doesn't allow me to save much photos or media with its very limited free storage space. Thus if you want more, you got to pay as well.

Then of course, there is this option of subscribing to a paid service and here is where I would like to share with my trial experience of using Acronis True Image Cloud with you. I am really a low tech person, and a laggard when it comes to technology. But I am VERY glad I got to try out Acronis True Image Cloud and this is what I liked about it -

• It was easy to setup, even for someone who is not well-versed in IT like myself. I only needed to download the program at http://go.acronis.com/ati/download. You can go for the free trial first too!
• After the program is installed, it is basically just a few clicks at the menu for you to start backing up your files, or even mirror your entire PC and there are no limits to your data storage space!
• Once you started the backing up, the program can be closed and it will continue to run backend. And if you needed to shut the PC down, it will continue from where it left after connection to the Internet is re-established when you turn on the PC again! 
• Now instead of needing to access my photos from the physical hard disk (which needed its separate power source), I can now access my copy from the cloud, anywhere, as long as I have access to the Internet!
• I downloaded the app for my iPhone as well and it was just as easy to backup all my contacts, photos, videos, calendar and reminders onto cloud!

We got our copy of Acronis True Image Cloud for one PC and 3 mobile devices.

And I only needed to key in the 64 alphanumeric characters to register the product. 64! And I needed my glasses lol.

The interface is super user-friendly and I had no problems navigation and starting my backup!

And then I moved on to download the app for my iPhone, and starting backing up my contacts and photographs to the cloud as well!

Finding a trustworthy and reliable backup solution provider and performing regular backups of your precious data is akin to buying insurance. Something that you hope you wouldn't require, but when shit hits the fan, you will be so thanking your lucky stars that you paid your dues! So do yourself a favor, go backup whichever way you want and don't follow in my earlier footsteps! Just don't say I never let you in on the easiest way I know, now. Thanks to Acronis of course!